Thank you.
Through you, Chair, to Mr. Fragiskatos's question, I appreciate that. Let me say at the outset that we received a fair amount of feedback from medium-sized and large communities right across this country in terms of our goal to be the first major city in Canada to have a fully electrified bus fleet. As we did so, we talked about two particular areas.
One is greenhouse gas emissions. If you can imagine, in terms of city-operated vehicles of all sorts, that we would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, and that ultimately all of our electric bus travel, when fully implemented, would represent a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, that's huge. It's also huge because in London it was important when, as a council this term, we declared a climate crisis, so everything we do is through the lens of this climate crisis. I think that's partly why the e-bus announcement that I declared in terms of our goal—my goal—was so well received and, interestingly, by the business community as well as the community at large.
One of the things they looked at was savings. There are a couple of things we know. For example, we realize that the initial cost of an electric bus has a higher price tag than a standard diesel bus, but in the longer term we save from the standpoint of going electric versus the diesel fuel, and then the rising cost of diesel fuel. We spend some $7.5 million per year in London, Ontario, and we're a community of just over 400,000 people.
As I used to say and I like to say, we are the 10th largest city in Canada. We don't hear that as often anymore, but I say it as often as I can, only to make the point that we're not the largest, but we are a serious-sized community. We know that over the course of this, millions of dollars will be saved. As the price of fuel increases, that goes right to the bottom line. We're pretty excited about that prospect.